


Tell Me About Phil

by sabinelagrande



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Cyberpunk, F/M, M/M, Mindfuck, One of My Favorites, Post-Movie, Recreational Drug Use, Spoilers, The Avengers Are Good Bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-17
Packaged: 2017-11-07 19:19:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil hasn't gone missing. Phil is gone. Clint is going after him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Now available as a podfic!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/728031)
> 
> Content note: This story contains references to mental health issues and a brief reference to drug-induced self harm.
> 
> Further (non-content related) notes at the end, which contain spoilers.

The battle is a fucking hell of a thing; Clint's done some crazy shit in his life, but it's never been like that, nothing like full out warfare. Certain incidents in Budapest aside, he's spent most of his career in tight, dark places, waiting things out, kicking people's asses one by one, shooting targets who never saw him coming and didn't live to see him go. This isn't like that at all; he's good at taking orders- whether or not he obeys them is another question- but he didn't think he'd be this good at cooperating, not with anybody but Natasha or Phil.

It takes him a while, after they've actually gotten a good meal and gotten cleaned up and everything like that, to start figuring out where everybody is and what happened. He very carefully avoids asking about numbers, about people who were with him, about people who were nearby, about the hazy faces he can sort of see when he thinks about the time he was under. 

There are people he's got to know about, though, things he's just got to know now and start dealing with. He's going down the list with Maria- who apparently he didn't kill, which is really good- Natasha and Steve there for support, when a thought occurs to him. "You didn't mention Phil."

Maria's face goes blank. Clint turns to look at Steve and Natasha; Natasha looks worried, and Steve just looks confused.

Clint's heart stops dead.

"What happened to Phil?" he says, and the three of them just look at each other, having a silent conversation that Clint's not part of. "Listen to me," Clint says carefully, rage rushing in to replace the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Someone is going to fucking tell me what the fuck happened to Phil."

"Who's Phil?" Steve says, in a small, gentle voice.

"Don't you fucking give me that, Rogers, you know exactly who the fuck I'm talking about," Clint says, his hand clenching into a fist. He feels like he's about ten seconds from hyperventilating, and he's not sure he won't punch Steve in the mouth before he gets there. "I am asking you where Agent Phillip J. Goddamned Coulson is. If you won't-"

"Clint," Natasha says, grabbing him by the biceps and looking him straight in the eye, the way he'd only let her get away with. "Clint, there is no one at SHIELD named Phil Coulson. I'm not trying to tell you that someone named Phil Coulson died. I'm trying to tell you that there was never anyone named Phil Coulson."

"Of all people, Natasha," Clint says, the betrayal of it like a lead weight, "I didn't expect to get fucked around like this by you."

"Barton, you're going to psych," Maria says, in the closest Maria gets to a kind voice.

"I don't need psych," Clint says, pulling free of Natasha's grip. "I need a straight answer."

He walks out, leaving them looking at each other; of course, when Maria Hill wants you in psych and Natasha Romanov and Steve Rogers are there to make sure you go, you don't walk very far.

Clint's had absolutely nothing to do with psych from the patient end; he's read their reports, but that's been the extent of his interaction with them. He's never even been down there- he suspects they only even have a place on the Helicarrier for situations exactly like this one, for when somebody with a bunch of combat training has supposedly lost it. It's bullshit, because the only thing he's lost is _Phil_.

The shrink's office isn't exactly the most plush one in the world. The chairs are nice, though they're bolted to the floor, but the walls are just bare bulkhead, infuriatingly abstract paintings hung up on them; Fury clearly lacks a certain amount of love for the psych division.

"Agent Barton, I'm Doctor Edwards," the shrink says, as Clint sits down across from him. "We haven't met formally, I'm afraid."

"Wish it could be at a better time," Clint says; he's still pissed as hell and he can't seem to stop from bouncing his knee up and down, but he might as well try and pretend this is going to be anything but a trainwreck.

"Tell me what's going on since you came back from the city," Edwards says calmly.

"Well," Clint starts, trying to control his breathing; he can't be doing this, he's got to get it back together no matter what's going on, he can't let it be known how big of a weak point Phil is for him. "I came to talk to Maria, and I found out nobody seems to remember my handler." He narrows his eyes. "If this is a training exercise, then I'm calling it right now. I lose, oh well, we'll get 'em next time."

"I assure you, Agent Barton, everyone here is being honest with you." Edwards smiles. "Or as honest as we're allowed to be. This is SHIELD."

"Funny," Clint says sarcastically.

"So tell me a little about Phil," the shrink says.

Clint has a thousand things to say. Phil is a hardass, Phil drinks coffee like water but never gets the jitters, Phil watches _Hoarders_ without shame, Phil is losing his hair but still manages to get really impressive bedhead, but Phil loves morning sex, so it was only ever going to get messed up anyway.

"How long have you been here, doc?" Clint asks him.

"Two years," he replies. "We haven't been on the same bases much, but I've been around."

"In two years," Clint says, giving him the stare that he's been informed is very uncomfortable, "you never met Nick Fury's right hand man?"

To his credit, Edwards doesn't flinch. "And that's who Agent Coulson is?"

Clint's not going to get angry; he's not going to scream. He's not going to do anything that'll get him sent to medical and pumped full of drugs. "Yes. That's Phil's position. He's a senior special agent, level 7 clearance. Yes, I know everybody thinks it goes up to six, but there are more. Fury's probably a twelve. Thousand."

Edwards nods. "Is Phil here now?"

And there it is. Clint rubs at his forehead. "If Phil were here now, I'd say, 'Hey Phil, say hello so this jackass will stop asking me stupid questions!'"

The shrink doesn't do him the courtesy of getting angry. "And you can't find Phil?"

He sighs. "I probably could if you people would let me go. I can't do anything sitting here with my thumb up my ass."

"Do you feel like this a lot, Clint?" Edwards says. "Like you're being held back?"

Clint gives him a look. "You're going to sit here and make me talk to you for an hour or two hours or whatever you want, aren't you?"

"You can leave whenever you like," Edwards tells him.

"You don't actually mean that," Clint says.

"I said 'can'," Edwards says. "That's true. I didn't say 'should.'"

Clint settles back into his chair; there's nothing to do but play ball, not if he wants to actually get away from this situation.

A few hours and a prescription for happy pills later, they do let him go. They've only released him on the condition that he be attended at all times; that sounds fine until Tony Stark rolls up to collect him. 

"How did you get volunteered for this?" Clint asks, as he tosses his stuff in the backseat of Tony's sports car. 

"I volunteered myself," Tony says. "Now get in. Happy's making steaks, and he and Pepper really will eat all of it if we don't get there fast enough."

"Isn't Bruce a vegetarian?" Clint says, climbing in and shutting the door behind him.

"Yes," Tony replies. "That's why we don't have to worry about _him_ eating our steaks." Tony turns up the radio and punches it; it's hard to talk about anything over the noise, and that suits Clint just fine.

It's actually not as bad as it could be; he's been crazy in a lot worse places. JARVIS won't let him leave the building, even when he tries his best building-escape techniques. Tony won't go against JARVIS, but Tony will, among other things, help Clint break into the SHIELD mainframe. Of anyone who can know about this, Clint figures Tony is the most likely to have his back; Tony already knows what kind of slippery bastards run SHIELD, and one disappearing agent is nothing compared to the shit they've already done.

"If this agent was in the system, he's been scrubbed out," Tony tells him, after a long night of running viruses and eating pizza; Tony seems oddly at ease doing it, and Clint wonders what Tony was like as a teenager, if Tony was ever really a teenager, if Tony's not a teenager now.

"It's SHIELD," Clint says, annoyed. "That doesn't mean anything at all."

"Bingo," Tony says, sitting back and stretching. "Time to get drunk to celebrate our failure. Or hey, do you like weed? Because Bruce has this stuff- I don't even know where he gets it, but you will see the face of _God_."

"Tony, it's four AM," Clint points out.

"Because you've cared about getting a good night's sleep ever in your entire life," Tony says. "Come on. You won't regret this one."

Clint's not entirely sure whether he regrets it or not. He spends a few hours laying on the roof of the tower watching the sun rise, rising with it, while Tony cackles for minutes at a stretch and Bruce just sits around in the lotus position observing calmly. He wakes up at three in the afternoon with a dry mouth and a sunburn, because Tony Stark is an asshole at heart.

It's fine, because most of the people he needs to talk to, they're the kind who tend to work at night. He calls contact after contact, he's blowing through pseudonym after pseudonym for favors, and no one, _no one_ remembers the quiet man in the black suit, no matter how loud he may have been at the time.

Natasha and Steve come to visit on day six; Steve brings flowers, but Natasha brings her clothes, and Tony doesn't do a thing to stop her from setting up shop. When there's a free moment, in between bouts of Tony being Tony, Steve pulls Clint to the side. "Hey," he says quietly, "if you need to talk, I can listen. I know it must be rough."

Clint is about to mouth off to him when he realizes that yeah, Steve does, he really does know how rough it is to lose somebody. Clint is still floored by what a good man Steve Rogers is, when the rest of them are a bunch of flighty dicks, with the possible exception of Bruce; here Clint is, apparently off his nut, and Steve's still willing to take him seriously, to respect the loss even of someone who, as far as Steve knows, never existed.

They really don't make them like Steve anymore, and it's entirely possible they never did.

Natasha comes to him that night, after Clint's gone off to pretend to sleep. "I don't want to," she says, "but we need to talk about Loki."

"I don't want to talk about Loki ever again unless we're talking about how nice his funeral is," he says darkly.

"He played with your mind, Clint," she insists. "He could have fucked anything up in there that he wanted to."

"Not this," Clint says. "This is too much."

"Clint-"

"If Loki did this to me, if Loki put all this inside my head, he is a sicker fuck than we even imagined," Clint says tightly. "There are years inside my head, Natasha. I can see _everything_. I am in love with Phil, and Phil loves _me_. It's been that way for a very long time, and you know that. You've always known."

He knows precisely what Natasha's views on love are, but she doesn't look disgusted, not today. "Clint," she says, as gentle as she ever gets. "Remember Kraków? You held me down for three hours so that I wouldn't scratch my skin open trying to get the spiders out."

"And the spiders went away in three hours, didn't they?" he says. "It's been a hell of a lot longer than that."

"Maybe it's going to take longer to get a whole person out than it does spiders," Natasha says.

"I don't _want_ Phil out," Clint says coldly. "If nobody remembers Phil but me and _I_ forget, then there was never a Phil at all."

Natasha has a concerned look on her face, the one that means she's about to say something that Clint doesn't want to hear. "They went to the address you gave them, the one for Phil's apartment," she says. "The apartment numbers don't go up to 308. It's a two story building."

The sick feeling in Clint's stomach, the one that never leaves now, it only gets worse, but somehow he already knew, he knew that whoever took Phil wouldn't leave it at that, would take everything of Phil's away from him too. "Well, that's just dandy," Clint says. "Guess I'm just too crazy to be delusional right."

Natasha knows him dangerously well; he knows she knows that there's no hope of changing his mind that night, that she's just going to have to come back later- and she _is_ going to come back later, even though Clint doesn't want her to. "Get some rest, okay?" she says. "I want you to feel better."

"Yeah, well, me too," Clint says; he doesn't point out that what he needs to feel better and what she thinks he needs are two completely different things.

Clint lays in the dark for hours, looking at the ceiling. He knows there is a Phil, he knows there has to be. He knows from his fantasies, he knows from his memories; working is one thing, all the missions they ran together, the days at SHIELD, but that's the part anybody could know, the part anybody could fabricate.

Nobody could fake the way Phil's skin feels against his, the way his body feels, the things they did together. Clint's fantasized a _lot_ ; before Phil, Clint mostly dated his hand, and he very clearly knows what something like that feels like, the idea of somebody sucking his cock or riding him, the false perfection, the selfish want of it. What Clint has of Phil, it's nothing like that at all. Clint can remember what it's like to have Phil in his mouth, heavy on his tongue, Phil's fingers tangled up in his hair; he can remember the time he moved the wrong way while they were fucking and Phil's head smacked into the wall hard enough that it left a little dent, the way they had to make up a work-appropriate story about it when it raised a knot, the way he didn't get laid for two weeks and didn't get to top for another month.

Clint refuses to lose an instant of that; he's not sure he wouldn't keep it if it weren't true.

They still don't let him go, not that it matters. He spent most of his time in Phil's apartment, and it has only recently occurred to him that half his shit was in there. If he's deluded it away, he's going to be pretty damn pissed. There's nowhere to go and nothing to be done. He's exhausted every contact and used up every favor; with Tony's help, he's wormed his way into the SHIELD computers as far as he can possibly go. The only thing he could do is start going to all the places they've been, but there are so many that Clint doesn't have a hope of remembering them all; even if he could, if Phil's in deep cover, burned, or just doesn't want to be found, he won't be in a single one of them.

Clint smokes a lot more of Bruce's weed and watches _Hoarders_ on Netflix for a couple of days, no idea what to do, no more energy to do it.

"I have some interesting news," Tony says, on the afternoon of day twelve, when he wanders in shirtless to the lounge, where Clint has been more or less just staring out the window. "I got an itinerary confirmation on a flight to Portland."

Clint raises an eyebrow at him. "For who?"

Tony goes to pour himself a drink; it's a bad sign. He sloshes some liquor into a glass, taking a sip before he answers. "Clint Barton and Phil Coulson."

Clint's face goes hard. "That's not funny."

"The tickets were booked before the whole thing with Loki and the space bugs- great band name, by the way." Tony says. He shakes his head. "There's nobody who'd do this to you, nobody who has access to my plane." While Clint's still sitting there, completely stunned, Tony comes over and claps him on the shoulder. "Leaves at nine AM tomorrow, so, y'know, don't be later than eleven."

The next morning, Clint's gone by seven-fifteen; by eleven, he's in one of Tony's cars, being chauffeured out into the city. Clint doesn't know where they're going; it didn't occur to him until they were halfway across the country that he had no idea what he was supposed to do when he got to Portland, just that he was supposed to go.

Thank God, the driver had already been given an address, and he takes Clint into a nice neighborhood, pulling up to a small but pretty house that Clint's never been to before. This trip must have been a surprise; Phil did good, because Clint is just as surprised as he could possibly be.

"Here are your keys, Mister Barton," the driver says, taking Clint's bag out of the trunk and setting it on the curb, which is good, because Clint was already thinking of ways to break in. "We'll see you on Monday."

"Thanks," Clint says distractedly, only barely remembering to give the guy a few bucks for his trouble- Pepper probably pays him a fair wage and Tony probably slips him a lot more, but it's just what you do when you're not a dick.

He walks up the sidewalk and up the steps to the door, leaving his bag on the stoop; it's hard as hell to bring himself to unlock it. He pulls his pistol out of his holster- God bless private planes- and opens the door slowly. The house isn't big, but he carefully clears it, all the way up into the attic; satisfied for the moment, he goes and picks up his bag, carrying it into the living room and setting it down on the couch.

Someone's been in here recently, probably one of Tony's people, because the fridge is stocked. There's vegetables and local beer; these people may have never heard of Phil before, but this is Phil all over, exactly the kind of grocery list Phil would have given them. There's a box of the trashy snack cakes Clint likes in one of the cupboards, and it makes Clint's heart hurt, knowing Phil knew him so well, knowing Phil is gone without a trace, gone somewhere Clint can't follow. He unwraps one anyway, eating it slowly, savoring the artificial sweetness; it's a very small comfort, but if you don't have any big ones, you need to take every little one you can.

He picks up his bag again, taking it into the bedroom and setting it down on the bed. Someone's been here, too; the bed has been turned down, and in very typical Tony fashion, there are mints on the pillows and lube on the nightstand. Clint's going to give Tony the benefit of the doubt on that one, because he's just not cruel enough to have added that to the shopping list after he found out about the itinerary.

Clint slides the closet door open, and he freezes. There are two garment bags hanging up; they're both tagged, BARTON and COULSON, the labels in Phil's surprisingly messy handwriting. Clint ignores BARTON, whatever, Phil bought him a suit, it's very touching but it's not important right now. He jerks down the zipper on COULSON, afraid of what he's going to see, afraid of what he might not see.

Hanging there is one of Phil's neat black suits, newly pressed; the shirt is new, very light green with subtle stripes, but the tie, it's the one Clint thought he'd lost, the plum-colored one Clint bought him a month before his birthday because he couldn't remember when his birthday actually was.

He never once wept in front of Phil, but Clint knows that if he had, Phil would have let him cry all the tears he needed to onto his suit without saying a single word about it, without even thinking about it. It's good, because Clint doesn't even know how long he sits in that closet crying into Phil's suit jacket, relief and pain pouring out of him in equal measure. 

Phil may be somewhere, Phil may be nowhere, but Phil _was_. Phil was, and if that's all Clint can have right now, then it's enough to go on, enough to give him the strength to keep trying. 

When Clint comes back to New York wearing an expensive suit with silk tie as an armband and won't take it off for love or money, nobody really says anything. He's already slap crazy; what's a weird fashion choice?

He's barely off the plane for two hours when he gets a text from Tony; it's a group one, telling everybody to meet up at the Tower, something Tony's never done, and Clint's more than a little curious.

"So here's something fun," Tony says, after everybody's there and ready, him and Natasha and Steve and Bruce; he looks shaky, white. "I can't find Pepper. All I have is a closet full of shoes with no one to go in them."

Clint takes a deep, deep breath, not looking at anybody but Tony. "I need you to calm down for one second, because you're going to flip out in about three," he says slowly. "I don't know who Pepper is."

The pain in Tony's eyes, the way his heart snaps is so hard to watch, but Clint doesn't look away. "I'm sorry," he says brokenly.

"It's okay," Clint says, and Steve reaches over, putting his hand on Tony's back, rubbing it comfortingly. "One is a problem, but two is a trend," Clint says, shaking his head. "This isn't deep cover. This isn't me being crazy. This is something else. I don't have a fucking clue what."

Bruce takes his glasses off, putting an elbow on the table and resting his forehead on his fist; Natasha just looks angry, the way she does when she hasn't figured something out yet and knows it.

"I wasn't going to say anything about this, because it's weird, and I didn't know what it meant," Steve says quietly. "I don't even know if it means anything now, but did Agent Coulson- did Phil collect trading cards?"

"He had a vintage set of yours," Clint tells him. "Wanted to get you to sign them, but I guess you never did."

Steve reaches into his pocket, pulling out his wallet. He flips it open and slides something out, putting it down in the middle of the table.

Clint picks it up; there are five cards with cheery images on them, pictures of Captain America, the Star Spangled Man. They'd be funny, kind of cute, except they're streaked with blood. "Where did you get these?" Clint asks; it hurts immeasurably and it lifts something off his heart, more evidence that Phil was real, evidence that Phil bled.

"They were in my locker with my street clothes," Steve says. "I don't have any idea how they got there."

"These were Phil's," Clint says, looking up at all of them. "You don't have to believe, but I need you to help." He takes one of the cards, putting the other four down on the table, and no one moves for a moment.

Natasha reaches over, picking up a card off the stack, and one by one, they claim their own.


	2. Chapter 2

"If people are disappearing like this, we have a few options to consider," Bruce says, standing up at the head of the conference table and flipping through something on his tablet.

"I'm going to go on and guess it wasn't gamma radiation," Steve says, and Clint can't decide if he's trying to sound sarcastic or hopeful.

Either way, Bruce doesn't dignify that with a remark. "Now, if we want scientists who are smart enough and have enough resources to do something like this, we've essentially got Tony-"

"No applause, just throw money-"

"-and Reed Richards. Now, I've checked, and Richards has been on his space station for the last three weeks."

"Leave it to Reed to be dicking around in space when we actually run into aliens," Tony says, rolling his eyes.

"Since that's out, then we've got to consider other options." Bruce takes his glasses off, putting his tablet down on the table. "To that end, I," he says, looking faintly embarrassed, "I know this guy."

"Why aren't we going to like this guy?" Natasha says.

"You picked up on that," Bruce says, smiling in that bashful way of his. "The thing about this guy is that he's a sorcerer. Sorcerer Supreme, as it happens." The room goes silent. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

There's more silence, but Clint finally breaks it; he sighs, rubbing his eyes. "If there is a magical force erasing people, it would not be weirder than this already is."

"His name is Doctor Stephen Strange, and he's in New York," Bruce says. "Well, his townhouse is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, so it's possible he's somewhere else entirely."

"Doctor who?" Clint says, unable to resist, and Tony gives him a look. "What, I'm not allowed to watch BBCA now?"

"I think I can get us a meeting, but it can only be one or two people at most," Bruce tells them. "He always said it was because there were too many dangerous artifacts in his house, but mostly I think he just doesn't like to be bothered."

There's a knock on the wall near the doorway. "Tony," Pepper says, sticking her head in. "I need to talk to you for a minute."

"Can it wait?" he asks, in a 'Just five more minutes, Mom' voice. "I'm doing Avenger stuff."

"No," Pepper tells him. "I wouldn't have bothered you otherwise."

"Go on without me, I'll catch up," Tony says, standing up from the table.

"Clint should go, then," Steve says. "It's only fair."

"I don't know about 'fair,'" Clint says; he doesn't really want to go sit and talk with a magic man, but if that's what he's got to do to get some answers, he'll do it. "But I'll give you 'necessary.'"

"I'll talk to him," Bruce says. "I don't know how soon he'll be free, but I'll try."

Clint nods. "Do it."

It's two agonizing days before the guy will see him. When Clint gets to the address he's been given, it's a perfectly normal-looking brownstone with a big bay window. Clint walks up the steps and rings the bell, but before he even takes his hand away, a woman answers the door; she's young, but her hair is pure white, and everything about her is ethereal, otherworldly. Clint's already got spooky on his mind, and he wonders a little if she's actually a person at all. 

"You are Clint Barton," she says. "I am Clea. You are here to see my husband."

"Uh, yeah, that's right," Clint says; he's not all the way into the building and these people are already weirding him out a little. "Nice to meet you."

"A pleasure," she says. "Please follow me."

Bruce wasn't kidding when he was talking about artifacts; Clint's reminded of _Hoarders_ again, just a little. The hallway, which yeah, is definitely longer than it should be, is so chock full of weird objects that Clint thinks- doesn't know, _thinks_ \- the walls might be glowing faintly. 

He sees why Bruce didn't dismiss this guy out of hand; this is a long way to go for a haunted house.

Clea shows him in to what must be Strange's study; a tall, thin man is waiting to receive him. He looks like no one so much as Vincent Price, and he is- Jesus Christ, here we go- wearing a cape, complete with a big stiff collar and a massive brooch at the closure.

"Mister Barton," the man says. "I am Doctor Strange. It's an honor to meet you- I understand you're part of the reason I didn't lose my home to Loki."

"Just doing my job," Clint says uncomfortably.

"Well, as long as someone can keep that annoying little pissant in line, I'm very happy. My hands are, unfortunately, tied on that score." While Clint is still wondering what the fuck, Strange extends an arm towards the straight-backed chairs that sit across from the window. "Won't you have a seat?"

"Thanks," Clint says; the chair is oddly comfortable, despite the look of it, and Clint automatically suspects magic. He's just in that mood.

"Tell me about the man you're looking for," Strange says, cutting to the chase. "I need you to be as specific as you can."

"His name is Agent Phil Coulson," he says, because he's clinging to the present tense with both hands. "He's my handler at SHIELD. He's the one who gives me missions, watches my back. He's also my- I don't know, we don't hold hands in the hallways and wear each other's letter jackets, I don't call him my boyfriend." He sighs; this is the wrong stuff to be telling him. "He's about my height, brown hair, receding hairline, medium build. If you hear somebody being really dry and sarcastic, that's him. Even in the-" He stops, not knowing what comes after that, not wanting to think about it. "Even if he's not on Earth, he's probably still wearing a really nice black suit. Be careful if you sneak up on him, because he's more dangerous than he looks, and if he can pick it up he can use it as a weapon."

Strange gives him a soft look. "You smile when you talk about him."

"Good," Clint says, because every time he does, he feels like he wants to break down all over again.

"Why do you want to find Phil?" Strange asks. "Why would you bring him back?"

Clint realizes that nobody's asked that question; they've just worked for it, done what they can just based on of a couple of bloodied trading cards, fascination, and some hope. His heart is torn up at the thought, the idea that these people, some of whom he barely knows, have his back like that. "Because it's not right," he says. "Because he matters too much to too many people, even if they can't remember that. Because he deserves it. Because I'm fucking selfish and want him back. I don't care if that's a bad reason or not." Clint shakes his head. "I just want him back."

"Selfishness makes the world go 'round," Strange tells him. "Selfishness drives us to love, and love makes going on worthwhile." He nods. "I'll help you." Clint goes to speak, but Strange waves him off. "This isn't a parlor trick or a game. I won't take your money and I won't hold a big spooky seance for you."

"Seances are for dead people," Clint says coldly. "I'd rather you not."

"Mister Barton," Strange says. "I won't hold back the truth from you. If he is dead, I won't sugarcoat it."

"I don't want you to," Clint says, shaking his head resolutely. "That's not fair to me or him."

"There's no guarantee I can find him or bring him back," Strange tells him. "I may not even find an answer to what has happened."

"Look, I'll take any help I can get," Clint says. "If there's any chance at all that you could find him or even find anything out, then I want you to do it."

"Then it's settled." Strange stands up. "I'll be leaving this plane for a while to look for him," he says, like it's no big deal, like he's going down to the corner store. "Time there doesn't pass like it passes here. A blink of an eye here could be a thousand lifetimes there, or five minutes there could be an age on Earth. You can stay as long as you like, but I won't be offended if you leave."

"I'll stick around for now," Clint says. "I'm not staying an age though."

"Good idea," Strange says, smiling. He walks over towards the window, arranging himself in the nest of pillows there, adopting the lotus position. Now Clint knows where Bruce got it; he imagines Bruce probably asked this guy for meditation tips, not help with astral projection. "Clea," Strange says, and it's only through a lot of practice that Clint doesn't jump out of his skin. She's standing right beside him, and he has absolutely no idea how long she's been there. "I'm going out."

"Of course, my love," she says. "I will look after Mister Barton while you are gone."

He smiles warmly at her. "See you on the other side," he says, extending a hand, and all the candles around his nest flicker to life. He shuts his eyes, breathing deeply for a few moments; Clint can't pinpoint the time when Strange goes into trance, but he suddenly knows that Strange is, that he has been.

"There is fresh coffee in the kitchen," Clea tells Clint. "We also have tea and cake."

So that's how Clint ends up in the Sorcerer Supreme's kitchen, drinking peppermint tea and eating the best goddamn cake he's ever had, leafing through a tattoo magazine that was laying on the table.

Then again, Clint's probably never had a normal moment in his entire life.

Maybe an hour later, Clea gets up; she takes a tray down from the top of the refrigerator, putting the coffee urn and a cup on it, cutting a huge wedge of cake and adding that too, along with a napkin. She carries it out and Clint follows her, curious. 

Of course, when they get back to the study, Strange is coming out of his trance; she sets the tray down out of the way and helps him to lie back, making him take a few sips of coffee and eat a few bites of cake. Clint kind of feels like he's intruding then, pushing in on something private.

It's several minutes before Strange sits up, looking pale, ravenously eating cake and guzzling coffee. He puts down his plate, wiping the corners of his mouth. "Mister Barton," he says, like he's surprised to see him. "I didn't think you'd stay."

"It's only been," Clint says, looking at his cell phone- of course he has no reception, and the screen keeps flickering, but the clock seems to be fine-ish. "It's been fifty-five minutes."

Strange shakes his head, as if to clear it. "That was a very short time for a very long journey."

"If you need me to go-" Clint starts, though it is exactly the opposite of what Clint needs.

"It's fine," Strange says. He looks at Clint, and Clint can already see the bad news in his eyes. "I need you to understand something. Sorcerer Supreme is not a title I made up for my business cards. I am the defender of Earth from all magical threats. For all practical intents and purposes, I am the most powerful magician on this planet." His face is deadly serious, drawn. "I have looked everywhere. I have touched the minds of the most adept, people whose abilities rival my own. I have faced forces that even you, who have fought Thanos-" a name Clint has never heard, which scares him- "cannot begin to conceive of." He sighs. "I have not found him. There is no force that could shield him from my eyes, but I have not found him."

Clint's shoulders slump. He knows all about disappointment; he'd been trying really hard not to get his hopes up, but he'd done it anyway, and even the little flicker he managed turned out to be too much. He feels tired, so tired, and he wonders how long he can keep this up, how many times his hope can be extinguished before it's put out entirely. 

"I'm sorry I wasted your time like this," Clint says, standing up; he's jumpy, all of a sudden, underneath the exhaustion, that feeling that he usually only gets after a lot of sleep dep. 

"If this has brought you any closer to finding him, then this wasn't a waste of anyone's time." He stands up slowly, extending a hand. "I hope our paths cross again, Mister Barton."

"If you need me, you know where to find me," Clint says, shaking it. "I mean, I don't think I probably have to tell you."

Strange smiles wryly. "I can see Stark Tower from here. It's not a particularly difficult inference." Clint tries to smile, but he can feel that it's not working. Strange puts a hand on his shoulder. "I have met many, many madmen in my time, but you don't strike me as one. If you need to do this, then don't stop. Deluding yourself is better than losing all your hope."

"Thanks," Clint says shakily.

"Clea," Strange says. "Why don't you show Mister Barton out?"

When he gets back to the tower, nobody asks him what happened; the answer is written all over his face. Clint takes a very long nap, and then he calls everyone together again. They look considerably less excited this time, much less focused.

"Back to square one," Steve says, without prompting. "We need a new game plan."

"It's my turn," Tony says, sighing. "I know this guy."

Clint stares at him for a moment. "Why didn't you 'know this guy' before I spent my morning drinking tea with a wizard?"

"Because one, he's weird and two, I don't trust him," Tony says, without hesitation. "His name is Garabed Bashur, calls himself Black Box. Really fascinating guy, says he has the power to collect electronic signals from all over the world, so if anybody's talking about our missing agent, he'll know about it. Pretty sure all that information would drive me insane," Tony adds. "I don't know if _he_ is, but I wouldn't make any sudden movements, just to be sure."

"Where is he?" Bruce asks.

"Bumfuck, Ontario," Tony says, "which is reason three I didn't bring him up. Natasha, Clint, grab your passports, the plane is already gassed up."

Sometimes it's really convenient to know a billionaire who's just as crazy as you are.

The sun is starting to set when they get off the plane, and by the time they get out into the sticks, it's almost dark. The place is set back off the road a little, not very big, with a slightly shaggy lawn and bars on the windows.

"Does this guy know we're coming?" Clint says, carefully assessing the front of the house; he wants to case the whole thing, but there's protocol about this type of stuff, and plus it's a really, really bad idea to leave Tony Stark unsupervised, even with Natasha.

"I texted him," Tony says. "Actually, I texted Pepper, but he'll get it. He's that kind of guy."

Natasha stops suddenly. "What did you say his name was?"

"He's-" Tony stops. "Wait, who are we talking about?"

"What are we doing here?" Clint asks.

"Yeah, they got Black Box," a man's voice says; a figure jumps down from the roof, apparently unconcerned about the fact that there are two assassins pointing guns at him. "Kinda ironic, right? The black box is the one thing you're supposed to be able to find."

"Clint," Natasha says, "do you remember this asshole?"

"I do now," Clint says. Beijing was not a fun trip.

The man's wearing a full face mask, red and black, but somehow it's really obvious that he's smiling. "Hi, I'm Wade Wilson, and I'll be your deus ex machina this evening." He looks contemplative for a moment. "Yeah, I like that. It's got 'god' in it. And 'machine.' And 'ex.' 'Ex' might be the best part."

"What are you doing here?" Natasha demands. "What is Black Box?"

Wade turns, looking at you. "Did you notice nobody remembers that Pepper was gone? That's my favorite part," he says. "It's not a fuck-up. All of the fuck-ups in this story are unintentional, including the part where it doesn't make any sense." He thinks about it for a second. "Maybe that one is intentional. Maybe the author just doesn't care."

Tony grabs him by the arm, pulling him back over. "Wait, what did you say?"

Wade's face doesn't move for a moment. "Can you hear me when I do that?"

"Yeah, you said something about Pepper being gone," Clint said.

"Who the hell is writing this?" Wade asks. "I never know if people are gonna hear me or not. Somebody needs to make a decision."

Clint glares at him. "Stop fucking around for five seconds and tell us what's going on."

"Here's the rundown," Wade says. "Coulson is gone- Coulson, great character, by the way, glad to have him in 616, look forward to antagonizing him- and nobody remembers him but Barton. Pepper was gone, but now she's back and nobody remembers she was gone- you people need to start leaving each other notes. Black Box is gone, and apparently I'm holding it down on that one. But then, I'm unstuck in canon." He opens his hands. "And that's pretty much that."

Natasha gets up into his face, pressing her gun into his stomach. "That's not everything," she says. "You're going to tell us every single thing you know, or you are going to be very, very unhappy."

"But there are thousands of more words to go in this story, and the end is a killer," Wade protests, apparently unconcerned with whether or not Natasha is going to shoot him. "Look, here's what you need to know: Tony Stark is the only nerd in the entire world who has never seen _World on a Wire_ or _The Matrix_ , not even to look at The Oracle, me _ow_."

"I don't like cyberpunk," Tony says, unhappy and confused, "and Keanu Reeves is an asshole."

"That is a damn shame," Wade tells him, "because brother, you have landed yourself in the wrong story."

"This isn't a fucking story," Clint says, and Natasha cocks her gun. "This is serious."

"Nobody said it wasn't a serious story," Wade says. "Or it was until I got here. Sorry about that, folks."

"If it's a story, then tell us how it ends," Natasha demands

"Sorry, I like it too much," Wade says, so Natasha shoots him in the knee, which is her usual method of dealing with situations like this. Wade staggers for a second, but doesn't fall. "That was just mean," he says, taking something off his belt; it turns out to be a grappling hook, and he shimmies up the rope and back to the rooftop, strolling away across it. "Don't give up looking, kids. I wanna see if the author pulls it off!"

"Well that was a hell of a thing," Tony says, watching him go.

"Yeah, that was," Clint says. "Something."

"Should we go after him?" Natasha asks.

"I don't see how it would be worth it," Clint says, sighing in annoyance. "If he can shake off getting shot in the knee, then there's probably no way we can get any information out of him. Plus I'm pretty sure he's crazier than a shithouse rat."

"But he knew about Phil, and apparently he knew why we're in the middle of nowhere to meet someone who none of us have ever heard of," Tony says. "I'm not saying he's not crazy. I'm saying that apparently we have to go force ourselves to look at Keanu Reeves for two hours." He waves a hand. "Do your secret agent thing and find out what's in the house."

There's nothing in the house, nothing of interest; the front door is unlocked, keys sitting in a bowl beside it. There's a room with a bunch of TVs in it, but that's the strangest thing in there. Natasha calls it, and it's back on the plane, back to the tower.

Watching Steve Rogers watch _The Matrix_ is a fascinating experience; Clint's already seen the movie at least twice, so watching him is much more entertaining. "What did I just see?" Steve says, when they're done; his eyes are big, and he looks terrified.

"Stick with the broad strokes, big guy," Tony says. "This world's not real, there are mechanical squid monsters out to get you, Neo is an anagram for 'one.'" He rubs his hands together. "Who wants a drink?"

"I don't need you to drink, Stark," Clint says, getting into his face; this is all fucking ridiculous, but they have this one thing and nothing else, one shot, one clue. "I need you to focus up."

"On what, Barton?" Tony says, his face going hard, and Clint knows instantly that he did the wrong thing. "Tell me exactly what I should do right now. Let's take a cryptic tip from a fucking lunatic and say that this entire world is an illusion. Let's say for one second that there's somebody above us, somebody who can pick people up at will and make it like they never existed. If they can do that, they can do anything. They could make us forget each other if we got too close. They could pick one or all of us up. They could put somebody else down who could stop us." Something dawns on Clint, and he can see Tony get it too. "Oh my God, he was right. If people come down and go up, then there are entrances and exits. We have to find one."

"The Tesseract," Clint says.

Tony shook his head. "Tesseract's gone. How did Goldilocks get here in the first place?"

"New Mexico," Clint tells him.

Tony lifts an eyebrow at him. "Gonna need you to be a little more specific here, Barton."

"Let me finish," Clint says. "He touched down in the desert in New Mexico. He used something he called the Bifrost, I don't know, some guy just picked people up and-" Clint resists the urge to smack himself in the forehead. "Wow, I should have thought about that a long time ago. But Foster and Selvig said it was an Einstein-Rosen bridge, connecting here and Asgard."

"Is nobody else bothered by the fact that the world might not be real?" Steve says, sounding very, very paranoid.

"Look, we can have an existential freak-out later, we're on a roll right now," Tony snaps, waving a hand at him. "So we start looking for the same energy signatures."

"That's all you and Bruce," Clint says. "Get us where we're going, and we'll figure it out from there."

"You heard the man, Banner," Tony says to Bruce, who still looks kind of lost. "Let's get to it." He steers Bruce out of the room, talking at him a mile a minute.

"Can I freak out now?" Steve asks.

Clint sighs. "Yeah, go ahead, man."

"Oh, good," Steve says. "Because this is all very scary and confusing."

Clint thinks about it for a second. "Scary, yeah. Confusing, scarily not."

"I don't think it's that scary," Natasha says. "If this world isn't real, I don't really care." Her face is unreadable. "It means I could change a lot of things that need changing, if I figured out how."

"Yeah," Clint says. "If it means we can actually change the world, then I'm pretty much fine with it."

"You people are really scaring me right now," Steve says.

"Honey," Natasha says, as sweet as she can manage, "we've had a lot of practice with this idea." She gives him a concerned look. "Do you want me to take your cell phone, just in case? I'm pretty sure the tower doesn't have any landlines."

Steve pulls it out of his pocket and hands it over. "Do you think we have any blue pills in the house?" he asks tentatively, and nothing about his manner suggests that he's kidding. "Because I don't want the red one."

Clint doesn't even make a Viagra joke. "You know what? Just for you, buddy, I'm going to go check the medicine cabinet."

Steve sighs. "I know it's really stupid, but thanks." Clint gets up, patting him on the shoulder.

Clint already knows there won't be.


	3. Chapter 3

It's battle mode after that, as much as you can be in battle mode when you don't know where the battle is. Bruce and Tony go into the labs and just don't come out; Natasha goes somewhere and comes back with a really impressive- and this is Clint saying this- amount of guns. Steve is going back through loads and loads of mission reports that Tony stole from the SHIELD databases, coming up empty every time but trudging on regardless.

Clint finds a sharpie and goes _Memento_ on himself, going over the notes with hairspray so they'll stick; there's no telling if the words will be taken away or not, but he does it anyway. His entire left forearm is filled up with PHIL COULSON, just in case, just to have the reminder of what he's fighting for.

The only thing they haven't done is actually called SHIELD; Clint has absolutely no doubt in his mind that Fury knows exactly what they've been up to, and if he hasn't interfered yet, he's not going to. Clint has and will put his life in Nick Fury's hands, but he really doesn't trust him as far as he can throw him. He's not even sure this doesn't have anything to do with some secret SHIELD project, but he does know for certain that SHIELD could only possibly slow them down.

It's a very tense two days before anything really happens, before an extremely harried Tony and Bruce call them together. "We've done everything we can here," Tony says, and he looks a little wild-eyed, like the only thing keeping him awake is chemical. "Into the bus, kids, we're going to Norway."

Natasha frowns. "What the hell's in Norway?"

"Jane Foster," Bruce tells them.

"Thor's girlfriend?" Clint says.

"Yeah, we thought we could do it without her-" Tony says.

"And we were wrong," Bruce finishes. "So, Tromsø it is."

"Does anyone here even speak Norwegian?" Steve asks.

"Yes," Natasha answers. 

"Right, stupid question," Steve says. 

"If this is _The Matrix_ and we find the Architect, I'm asking that bastard for a teleporter," Tony says. "The price of jet fuel is killing me." He claps his hands, rubbing them together. "Shall we, lady and gentlemen?"

Clint is not really surprised when Tony and Bruce pass out five minutes after the plane lifts off. It takes Clint a second to realize why it's weird to him that Bruce is on a plane; if that's the point they've come to, then this shit has gotten real- appropriate, Clint thinks.

They're maybe an hour from Norway when the machine that's sitting in between Tony and Bruce starts going crazy, buzzing like it wants to jump off the table. Tony starts awake, shaking Bruce's shoulder, and they start pressing buttons wildly, in some pattern that Clint can't possibly hope to understand.

"Little help here?" Clint finally says.

"We have it," Bruce says, not looking up from the machine. "We've got all the earmarks of an Einstein-Rosen bridge about to open."

"Where?" Natasha demands.

Tony looks at him. "Let's say I'm not asking the pilot to turn around."

"That's good, right?" Steve asks.

"Could be good, could be bad," Bruce says. "Might get us answers, might tear the plane apart." He looks around at them. "If it does, it was nice knowing you."

"Can't you make this bucket go any faster?" Clint says.

"It's a plane," Tony says, annoyed, too caught up to even catch the sarcasm. "It doesn't have a turbo boost. We are going as fast as we can, and it is _pissing me off_."

"Wormhole's open," Bruce says. "How long it stays is anybody's guess."

The machine goes quiet.

Tony groans. "And now it's closed. Well, on to the post-mortem."

They more or less break in when they get to the facility in Tromsø, but nobody seems to notice; everybody is running around shouting at each other. Alarms are going off everywhere, lights flashing in the hallways.

Natasha reaches out, grabbing one of the scientists by the collar and shaking him. "Jane Foster," she says, and the scientist stops being excited and gives her a blank look. Natasha says something to him, but he cuts her off, pointing back to the lab. She shakes him again, raising her hand, and he flinches back. He's obviously scared, insistent on something, and he looks pathetically grateful when Natasha lets him go, running off before she can grab him again.

She shakes her head, and they don't have to ask what it means.

"So," Tony says, sighing. "There's that."

"We're getting closer," Steve says. "If they haven't made us forget her, then that's different."

"If we can get this close, then we can get through," Clint says resolutely. "We're going to get through."

"Can we at least get lunch?" Natasha says. "I know this is me saying this, but we all need to rest for a second."

"It's on me," Tony says wearily. "Granted, you should expect everything to always be on me, because that's what billionaire friends are for."

After lunch, it's back to New York, where Tony and Bruce hole up in the labs again, having 'appropriated' as much of Foster's data as they could get their very capable hands on. Clint is getting very, very sick of hurry-up-and-wait, but that's his life lately, ever since Phil has been gone. 

He and Steve and Natasha are sleeping in shifts, just in case, even though Clint knows none of them are actually sleeping. Apparently other people know it too; Clint's supposed to have been asleep for an hour, but there's a soft knock at his door.

Steve's there, and he's smiling, kind of sadly. "We never had that talk," he says.

"Come in," Clint says, and Steve walks in, sitting down in the chair. "What did you want to talk about?" Clint asks him, sitting down at the edge of the bed.

"I'm supposed to be asking you that question, I think," Steve says. "So tell me about Phil."

Clint shuts his eyes. "You would not believe the number of times I've been asked that lately."

Steve gives him a look, the kind that Clint didn't even know Steve could have; it goes right through him, cuts in deep. "Have you given anybody a straight answer?"

Clint laughs, breathlessly. "I'm a SHIELD agent," he says. "Straight answers aren't our strong suit."

"Listen, I," Steve says, "I came because I thought you'd want to talk to somebody who understood. I know for me, one day everything was- well, it wasn't fine, we were in the middle of World War Two for crying out loud, but everything was where it should have been. And then I woke up and-" He opens his hands.

"Brave new world," Clint says.

"Yeah," Steve says. "And I wish I could go back and see everyone, even for a second. I can't. I hope that you can."

"I hope I can too," he says, looking down at his arm, the big letters there to remind him, the ones that haven't gone away. "I've been through a hell of a lot, and Phil's the only person who's ever loved me. I've spent my entire life getting away from one situation or another, and he's the only one who's ever been worth staying for."

"It's not the same thing at all," Steve says gently, "but we love you, too. Tony and Bruce haven't slept in days, Natasha's still running down other leads when she thinks nobody's paying attention, and I-" He falters. "I am terrified of what we're going to find out. I am terrified that all this is actually for real, because I'd much rather know that we've all gone completely crazy and started tilting at windmills." He sighs. "But I'm going to stick with it, because we're in this for each other, and we're in it for Phil."

"Phil would pass out if he heard you talk about him like that," Clint says, swallowing down the lump in his throat. "He's your biggest fan."

Steve takes his wallet out, pulling out his trading card; he's signed it across the bottom, 'Captain America' in big swoopy letters. "I can't wait to hear all about it."

Clint is about to speak, but suddenly there's a loud noise, like a fire alarm, and they're both up in an instant.

"Attention, all Avengers," Tony's voice says over the PA that the tower apparently has, and he sounds like hell. "We have reason to believe an Einstein-Rosen bridge is about to open, so if everyone could please get the fuck up to the lab, that'd be great. Thanks."

Clint and Steve look at each other, and then they're racing up the stairs, not bothering with the elevator.

Tony and Bruce are flying around the lab when they get there, and Natasha is leaning back against a table, in her best 'I don't want you to know that I am ready to take you out within forty-five seconds' stance.

"Where is it?" Clint asks.

"Working on it," Tony says, and the machine from the plane has grown, weird things coming off of it from all angles, most of it duct taped on. "I have something, but it doesn't seem right. Banner, are you looking at this?"

"Yeah, I see what you're talking about, but I don't get it either, it shouldn't be-" and then he goes off into something that Clint doesn't follow at all, Tony popping in at intervals to object.

"But that doesn't make any sense unless-" Bruce suddenly drops his tablet. "Oh shit," he says, his eyes wide and scared. "The call is coming from inside the house."

Tony puts his hand over his face. "Why does that always happen?"

"Well, if we are in a story, then it's not all that surprising," Bruce says nervously. "It's very common in these kinds of narratives."

"Do we know where in the house, or should we start searching the building?" Natasha asks, taking her gun from her holster.

"We don't know who or what in the house, or whether something's been taken or added," Clint points out, "unless you could rig up some kind of detector," he adds, looking at Tony hopefully.

"I'm good, but I'm not that good," Tony says begrudgingly. "If I had Thor here, maybe, someone who's traveled in it, but no."

"Well, has anybody been gone?" Steve asks. "Has anybody left and come back?"

Clint looks down at his arms; he holds one up, showing them his right palm. PEPPER, it says, in messy, slightly smeared capitals.

"Good enough," Tony says.

"Off to see the wizard," Steve says.

Tony shakes his head. "We've gotta get you some new pop culture references."

"Um, we've got to see how far the rabbit hole goes?" Steve tries.

"We'll take it," Bruce says.

Pepper's office is only two down; Steve insists on going in first, carefully making sure there isn't anything lurking, but there's nothing. There's nothing at all but Pepper's office, big wooden door, frosted glass separating it from the rest of the floor.

They stand in front of it for a while, looking at each other, until Natasha rolls her eyes, sighing, and knocks. "Come in," Pepper calls, and Natasha opens the door.

Clint's never been to Pepper's office before; it looks like it belongs to her, very clean, white and grey and light wood, clearly expensive art on the walls, her own elevator. Pepper is leaning back against the edge of her desk, her ankles crossed, holding a black leather folder over her lap. "I was wondering when you'd come."

"We're not sure why we have," Steve says. "Right? Because I'm not a hundred percent sure."

"I thought you'd worked it out by now," Pepper says.

"Why did you leave?" Clint asks. "Why did you come back?"

The elevator opens of its own accord. "Would you like to come upstairs and discuss it?" she says.

Clint looks at the rest of them, and they're all waiting; this is all him now. "Are you going to push me off the roof?" he says.

"Would it matter if I did?" Pepper asks.

He steps forward, indicating the elevator. "Ladies first," he says, and he follows Pepper in.

The door shuts.

\--

Clint doesn't ever actually step off the elevator. He just blinks his eyes open, and he's in a windowless room. It's not precisely what he expected from the real world, looking like a fancy waiting room, the kind you'd find in a lawyer's office or something.

Pepper is standing in front of him; she's wearing a different suit, and he could swear she's shorter. "Welcome to the top level," she says.

He feels very strange, like his body isn't on right. He looks down at himself- he looks down at someone, because last time he checked he didn't have breasts. "Okay, who the hell am I?"

"Sorry," she says. "Our Barton has been dead for quite some time. You're Maria right at the moment."

"Well, that's fun," Clint says, because it is the only response he can think of to information like that. "So, you're up here using us like batteries? That's great. Way to go."

She sighs. "We don't censor media that's made in the System," Pepper says, "not unless we absolutely have to, but that movie had to be banned. Enough people already think the System is unethical, and if they thought _that's_ what we were doing-"

"Okay, so this isn't _The Matrix_?" he says, cutting her off. "I just want a confirmation on that one."

"No, this is not _The Matrix_ ," she says patiently.

"What about Wade Wilson?" he asks. "That's what he said."

She frowns. "We're not sure what the Deadpool unit is, and we can't catch it. I suppose he was just having fun."

"He was sure having a hell of a good time," Clint says, crossing his arms. "If you'd stopped him, I wouldn't be up here."

"I'm not entirely sure of that," she says. "I think it just would have taken you longer to figure it out." Pepper shrugs. "Then again, a lot of people tried to make sure you didn't."

"Where is Phil?" he demands.

Her smile is sad. "There is no Phil."

"Don't you fucking give me that," he snaps, pointing a finger at her. He's long past the point of being afraid that he's crazy; now he's just pissed off at being contradicted. "Don't you fucking tell me there was never a Phil. I did not come all this fucking way chasing someone who didn't exist."

"Let me explain a few things, and then we can talk about what you're looking for," she says, which is good, because he kind of forgot that he has no idea what's going on, because it's not as important as where Phil is. "Your reality is called the System. Users pay a small fee to upload copies of themselves to the system, for various reasons. Barton, for example-"

"I don't want to hear anything else about dead me, okay, that's just too weird," Clint says, waving her off. 

"Fair enough," she says. "Then take someone like Bruce Banner. The original Banner was quickly uploaded after having a lab accident involving gamma radiation, just before it killed him. His progress can be viewed through certain- well, they're almost like cameras. His family finds it comforting, knowing he's alive in the System, despite what has happened to him."

"This is some fucked up shit you're telling me," Clint says; he tries to cross his arms over his chest, but Maria's breasts get in the way, and he quickly puts them down.

"There was resistance to the System at first," she says, "but it's commonplace now to become a user. It's not all that different from a video game, except that one's avatar has a life of its own."

"Yeah, you're goddamn right it has a life of its own," Clint says.

Pepper studies him. "I'm sorry, it's just that no one's ever come up here before. You seem to be taking this oddly well."

"Lady, you have seen the kind of week I've had," Clint says. "All you're doing is mopping up. Now that we're all on the same page, let's do this again: Where. Is. Phil?"

"I'm afraid the answer's not any different this time, Clint," she says. "There was an entity in the System you interacted with who you called Phil," she tells him. "But it wasn't a copy of a person."

Clint stares at her, unable to speak.

"Agent was an experiment," she says. "We've fabricated non-copy units before, but they were for the other servers, units that didn't have to pass for users." She smiles fondly at the memory. "Agent was a labor of love, a unit who was close enough that he was practically a copy."

Clint is still trying to put into words the number of things that he wants to say.

"We all liked Agent," she continues. "When Loki killed him-" Clint's stomach drops- "it was heartbreaking for all of us. But Agent was already learning how to play the system- we think he even flew once, but we're still debating that. He was getting very close to consciousness of the System. No copy has ever been able to do that."

Clint has given up on words.

"No one witnessed the actual crime except the Loki and Thor units, and they're back on the Asgard server," Pepper tells him. "They may not return to Earth. If they do, Agent will be wiped from their memories. We did let the simulation run on long enough for Agent's death to be felt by the other copies, but then we pulled him."

"The cards?" Clint asks.

Pepper looks sad. "I don't think you want to know. The Fury copy thought-"

Clint holds up his hand. "Yeah, I don't wanna know. But what happened to _you_ then? To, to Xerox Pepper. She was back and forth, or so I've been told."

"I had to pull her out momentarily so that I could replace her," she says. "You missed all of it, which is good, because it was a ten-minute hack job. I'm kind of embarrassed of it."

"You should be embarrassed of all of it," Clint says. "I mean, forget shame for a second, you people are doing a pretty shitty job if you wiped this guy and left so much of him around."

"Pulling units and copies silently is in beta, as are quick pulls with bridges," she says apologetically. "I'm afraid we implemented them far too soon. We weren't expecting some copies to cling so tightly."

"I've been known to be a stubborn bastard," Clint says. "And I want him back."

She purses her lips, looking frustrated with him. "The Agent unit-"

"His fucking name was Phil," Clint snaps. 

She sighs. "Phil is considered unstable by the programmers. He's set to undergo testing that might take months, years-"

"I don't care how you have to do it," he insists. "Make it work. Say he's a clone or an LMD or whatever the hell, whatever he needs to be to make sense. Just give him back."

Pepper stares at him for a moment. "You're asking me to send you back with a fake version of a fake person. That would be enough for you?"

"If it was the only way I could get Phil back, then yes," Clint says. "Besides, I'm dead, right? We'd be a matched set."

She sighs. "I really do miss Barton."

Clint lifts an eyebrow. "Standing right here, Potts."

"I can't make you any promises, because the final decision isn't up to me," she says. "All I can do is put in a good word. I can't even promise there won't be a rollback after this event. After that, you might not remember Phil at all." She smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes. "But now, I'm afraid I have to send you back down."

"Can I ask you one question before I go?" he asks.

Pepper looks amused. "You've already asked me a lot of questions."

"Then here's one more," he says. "How do you know _this_ world is real?"

She opens her arms. "How could we?" she says. "Now, if you'll just shut your eyes, I'll put you back. I really do wish you the best of luck."

He snorts. "That's up to you, now isn't it?"

"Not exactly," she says. "We didn't program in all that free will for nothing."

He shuts his eyes. "Now there's a contradiction if I ever heard one."

"Goodbye, Clint."

Clint smiles. "Oh, Tony says to tell you he wants a-"


	4. Epilogue

Phil is sitting up against the headboard when Clint wakes up. He's reading a book, and he's wearing his reading glasses, the ones that he hates and Clint loves; he takes them off very quickly once he realizes Clint is up. Clint moves in close, cuddling up against him. Clint is too warm, hot from too much sleep under too many blankets, but that doesn't stop him. He puts his head on Phil's thigh, and Phil obligingly scratches his scalp for a moment.

Clint turns, looking up at him. "Hey."

"Hey yourself," Phil says.

He stretches. "What time is it?"

"Ten o'clock," Phil tells him.

"You didn't get me up for breakfast?" Clint says, a little offended. 

"I got up at nine-thirty," Phil says. "There was no breakfast."

"Fair enough," Clint says. "What's on tap for today, boss?"

" _The Matrix_ is playing at the dollar theater this week," Phil offers.

"I've never actually seen it," Clint says.

Phil shrugs. "You might like it."

"I usually like sci-fi." He sits up, leering at Phil. "I like other stuff better."

Phil makes the grumpy 'doctor's orders' face he's been wearing a lot lately. "Clint, I don't know if-"

"If you can lay still and let me give you a blowjob?" Clint says, and Phil stops, raising an eyebrow at him. "Yeah, that's what I thought. Come on, lay down."

Phil carefully gets onto his back, wincing a little- he's allowed to be a little slow, considering he's got a huge spear wound in his chest that's nowhere near healed. Clint's gotten good at getting on top of him without damaging him; it's a very handy skill when Clint's got a serious urge to torment that one little spot on Phil's shoulder, the one that makes Phil bite his lip.

"If you want me to lay still," Phil says, his hands moving down from Clint's waist and onto his ass, "you have to quit doing that."

"What, this?" Clint says, deliberately biting again.

"Clint," Phil groans, the frustrated kind of groan, the kind Clint doesn't want to hear.

"Okay, okay," Clint says, moving down Phil's body, stopping to kiss his stomach as he works his way down, pulling Phil's boxers off as he goes. Phil's cock isn't all the way hard yet, but that changes quickly when Clint takes it into his mouth, sucking gently just to tease him. He pulls off and takes it in his hand, stroking it the rest of the way before running his tongue along the underside, lapping at the head.

Clint starts sucking him in earnest then, wrapping his lips around his cock and bobbing his head. He could sit here and do this for a very long while, but all sexy fantasy aside, Phil really will get tired out pretty quickly, so it's better not to draw it out too terribly long. That's not a problem today; Phil's already got his hand in Clint's hair, and he's rocking his hips a little, trying to get more of Clint's mouth. Clint doesn't hold back, rolling with it, letting Phil take what he wants. 

Clint only knows Phil's going to come by the way Phil grabs at him; he's got a bad habit of holding Clint's head and not letting him up, but Clint doesn't really care. It's a momentary inconvenience, and if he said anything, Phil would probably be embarrassed and pretend like he didn't want Clint to suck him off, which is patently untrue.

When he's done, Phil smooths down Clint's hair apologetically. "Come up here," he says, and Clint happily goes, straddling Phil's hips; ever since Phil's injury, Clint's been reacquainting himself with how very good Phil's hands are, and it's a beautiful thing.

It's no time at all before Clint is pushing into Phil's hand, moaning as Phil strokes him, just exactly the way he wants it; his head drops back as he comes, and he makes breathless noises at the ceiling, lost in it entirely, lost in him and Phil and how good this is, how good they are together.

Clint lays back down beside him, tucked up against his side; he rests his face against Phil's shoulder, maybe making happy noises, maybe not. When he looks up, though, Phil is looking back at him, the oddest expression on his face.

Clint frowns. "You're staring at me."

"I was thinking about how lucky I am to be here with you," Phil says sincerely.

"Don't get sappy on me now, Coulson," Clint says, grinning.

Phil shakes his head. "I mean it."

"You're not so bad yourself," Clint says, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek, but Phil intercepts him, kissing him on the mouth instead, deep and slow, like it means something that Clint's just not getting. When he pulls away, he rests his forehead against Clint's for a moment, and Clint doesn't know what to do with any of it, but his heart feels swollen.

"Now breakfast," Phil says, after he lets Clint go, making no move to get out of the bed.

Clint narrows his eyes. "I'm on to you," he says. "This has all been a big scam to get me to make you bacon and eggs."

"And toast," Phil says. "With jelly."

"Only because you're injured," Clint says, rolling out of bed. "When you're not all jacked up, you're making _me_ breakfast."

"We'll see," Phil says, smirking. "Clint," he says, when Clint's almost out of the room.

"Yeah?"

"I love you."

"I love you too, but it's not getting you fresh-squeezed orange juice."

Phil's laugh follows him down the hall.

**Author's Note:**

> Pepper was correct: this is not _The Matrix_. This started life as a fusion with _[Welt am Draht](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welt_am_Draht) (World on a Wire)_ , though clearly, it went quite far afield. Hopefully, it still makes a certain amount of sense (or as much sense as cyberpunk is supposed to make).
> 
> It remains for me to thank all the people I tormented with this story: the incomparable dizmo, my partner in crime coffeesuperhero, and my matching action figure shadowen, all of whom are troopers for putting up with me.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Tell Me About Phil](https://archiveofourown.org/works/728031) by [sabinelagrande](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabinelagrande/pseuds/sabinelagrande)




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